Living Sacrifices

Totally devoted to it. Drives his mother crazy. She wants him to be studying math and physics. He just wants to study the new strum patterns from the Switchfoot album that just came out. We've got a teen in our church who's totally into drama. She's homeschooled, so there's no school with plays for her to join. It doesn't stop her. She creates scripts of her own, recruits other teens to join her. They don't know they can say no. She has them memorizing lines and acting, totally devoted.

Of course, sports captures the minds and hearts of many young people. We've got soccer crazies and flag football enthusiasts. And something you probably don't have here, we have badminton fanatics. When Keith was with us, we made him get out on the court with a badminton racket. And I can tell you of my great regrets is that there's no video of this. Your pastor is of doubtful coordination in many places, but on the badminton court, oh, it was beautiful. I mean, Keith thinks of badminton as like a backyard barbecue sort of thing. And this was a different thing entirely, wasn't it?

I mean, these guys are totally devoted to their sport. When you're all in on something, your devotion fuels countless hours of early morning exercise, of late night practice, of daydreaming new moves, time and energy and money, whatever it takes. When we say someone's devoted to something, what do we mean? We mean that there's some sort of internal love that flows into external behavior. That's what we mean. When we say he's a devoted family man, we mean his love for his family takes the form of organizing his whole life to provide for his family, to be with his family, to serve his family. When we say she's a devoted friend, what do we mean? We mean that something inside of her drives her to always be there for her friends. no matter how inconvenient it is for her. Whenever we see or talk about devotion in a person, these two things are present. Internal love, external behavior. Internal devotion, external dedication.

I want to look this morning at this precious passage from the book of Romans, Romans 12, one and two. It helps us envision the Christian life in just those terms. Our church in China has been living in the Book of Romans the past year. I've been freshly convinced that God through the Apostle Paul wants you and I to let his grace change our lives. That Christianity is supposed to be the opposite of stale, boring, burdensome. Instead, the doctrines of grace that save sinners like you and I are supposed to create an internal love fueling external dedication.

And that that's the key to everything for us. That's the key to our worship. That's the key to our work. That's the key to change lives and our growth as believers. So the big idea of the text that I want to leave you with this morning is that devotion to God fuels dedication to grow. Devotion to God fuels dedication to grow.

Cheryl read the text once. I'm going to read it again and then give our outline.

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Let's study it together in two points. Number one, devotion to God. That's first one, devotion to God. And then point number two, dedication to grow. Dedication to grow, verse two. Let's dive into this. Think about point number one, devotion to God.

Devotion to God

As the apostle says,

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Now, what I'm calling devotion is this command that you can see in the text, to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. That language is not new in the book of Romans. In chapter 6, Paul has already told the believers to present themselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life.

Here, though, he puts it in the context of sacrifice. He has us envision the Old Testament temple and the many different types of offerings that would have been made there. The worshipper would have brought offerings to God. We can picture the priest offering them. But here, though he uses Old Testament imagery, he tells us five ways that this sacrifice is new and unique.

So first, it's an inclusive sacrifice. He says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers. Brothers there is the collective use of the Greek word Adelphos. It means brothers and sisters. So all the Christians in the church are being asked to make this sacrifice.

In the Old Testament, there was a special role of the priest in bringing the offering, but not here. There's no spiritual elite. There's no hierarchy when it comes to this act of Christian worship. Not just the pastor, not just the mature Christians, everyone. There's no believer that should exclude themselves from this. Nobody can or should say, I'm just a lukewarm Christian. I'm just sort of a Christian. Instead, this sacrifice is intrinsic to what it means to be a Christian. So it's an inclusive sacrifice.

Second, it's a bodily sacrifice. When he says, present your bodies, he means your whole self, the totality of who you are. In verse 2, he's going to connect it to the renewal of our minds. So it's clear that this is a complete bringing of ourselves, body and mind, or body and soul to God. You know, sometimes we imagine ourselves to be dividable, our internal self and our external self.

So a person might think of offering their body to God, but not their mind. So I was physically in church, but my mind was somewhere else. Glance at my phone, start to think about my schedule for next week. Like the student who offers his body to math class, but mentally is not there at all.

Or conversely, we might think of our relationship with God as merely internal. merely a spiritual relationship with God. So I offer Him my worship. I add some Christian songs to my Spotify playlist. I think of myself as a Christian, but I don't really change what I do in practical ways. It's kind of a disembodied Christianity. Listen to what John Stott writes.

No worship is pleasing to God that is purely inward, abstract, and mystical.

It must express itself in concrete acts of service performed by our bodies. Our feet will walk in his paths. Our lips will speak the truth. Our hands will lift the fallen and perform many mundane tasks, like cooking and cleaning. Our arms will embrace the lonely and the unloved. Our ears will listen to the cries of the distressed. And our eyes will look humbly and patiently towards God.

Friends, make sure you and I pay special attention to the bodily aspects of our worship. This gathering on the Lord's Day, your sleep last night, your arrival in the morning with time to spare, your daily routine, I don't know what your life is like here in Asia where I live. What we call revenge bedtime procrastination is a huge problem. Watching videos at midnight means you're not going to get up in the morning to read God's word and to pray through your day.

Your body is the leading edge of your worship to God with your whole self. So an inclusive sacrifice, a bodily sacrifice. Third, it's a living sacrifice. In the temple, sacrificial animals were brought live and then killed. The Christian comes to God willing to die to ourselves and live for him. We count ourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. We put to death what belongs to our earthly nature. We die to our own desires as we take up our cross and follow him.

Then we keep offering this living sacrifice day after day as we live for him. So the Christian is supposed to wake up every day and say, I give myself to God today for his glory. I'm living for him. I'm living for his glory. I want to do his work. I'm living for his purposes. This day is not about my comfort. It's not about my enjoyment. It's not about my self-advancement. In short, this day is not about me. It's about him.

One of the most freeing things for a believer is to internalize that verse that says, you are not your own. It comes from Paul's reflection in 1 Corinthians 6 on why the Christians should flee from sexual immorality. He says,

or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You're not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

A living sacrifice is an ongoing, continual reflection on this truth that we belong to him.

I hear a head-scratching phrase from time to time. People will refer to me-time. You know what me-time is? I know what they mean. It's good to take time to rest and do things that you enjoy, but I think it's an unfortunate phrase. I don't think we should think about me time. It reminds me of an important parenting strategy, which is to abolish in your children the concept of private property. You should help your children understand that there's nothing in their little worlds that don't belong to mom and dad. You're making an important theological point and helping them to realize that in the world, there's nothing that doesn't belong to their heavenly father. So friend, don't think about me time.

Think about how you can give yourself today to live for him. It's a living sacrifice. Fourth, it's an acceptable sacrifice. Paul says holy and acceptable to God. Holy means set apart. It means devoted to God. It refers to something that is sacred to him. In the Old Testament, this kind of sacrifice took the form of an unblemished animal. Sometimes the prophets would condemn the people who brought diseased or sick animals instead of the best and the healthiest. Those sacrifices were meant to communicate the purity that God requires.

What's amazing here is that you and I, who are unholy, and sinful in ourselves could be this holy and acceptable sacrifice. How could we be that? That's the precious truth that Romans 1 through 4, those chapters, was all about, as Paul patiently explains how God justifies the ungodly in Jesus Christ. The unrighteousness that's in us that deserves wrath An eternal condemnation is replaced with the righteousness of Jesus Christ in that wonderful concept called imputation.

Romans 3.23,

all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.

If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, this is the most important thing for you to hear If you don't understand this, you might walk away, and if you've had a good experience, think to yourself, man, those Christians are amazing. They even talk about offering their whole selves to God.

I could never be like that. Friend, don't misunderstand what you're looking at here. Every one of us has lived selfishly and wickedly. We had nothing to offer God, and if we had something, we wouldn't have wanted to offer it. God looked at us in our helpless state and decided to give us as a gift something we had no ability to achieve on our own. Oh friend, if you would understand what God offers you this morning, you would not leave this place without being sure that you would receive that gift. Believe on Christ this morning.

A reasonable sacrifice

Receive the gift of his imputed righteousness for you that allows you to stand before God, an acceptable sacrifice. Number five, he says it's a reasonable sacrifice. The final descriptor here is the sacrifice which he says is your spiritual worship. I'm zeroing in on that word spiritual. In the Greek, it's logikos, which is where we get the word logical. Other translations render it as rational, or this is your reasonable service of worship. Reasonable is what I want stuck in your mind. reasonable worship.

The idea is that if you understand what God has done for us in Christ, this sacrifice of ourselves makes all the sense in the world. If I'm acceptable to God because of what Christ has done, how should I then live? Or look back at that first phrase he used, where he says, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God.

When I was a new believer, I had become a Christian at JMU as a freshman. I had gone home, staying in my dad's house, and I woke up at two in the morning, something like that, middle of the night. Couldn't sleep, decided to pick up my Bible, and I was too young a believer to know that you could just read one chapter of the Bible and that was an okay quiet time. So I picked up the book of Romans, and I started reading.

And I remember 30-some years ago, getting to Romans 12 verse 1, and reading this phrase, by the mercies of God, and a chill went down my entire spine. Because if you could take it all in, if you can take in all the grace, and just let it fill your mind and heart, even as we've just sung of the amazing grace, how sweet the sound, if you can capture that sweetness for yourself, then this should make all the sense in the world. I wonder if it's possible that the good news has faded for you, if you've been a Christian for very long, that you've forgotten that the application for you is to take an hour this week and read all the way through.

Read from Romans 1 and read about how the gospel is the power of God for salvation. And read in chapter 2 about how his kindness leads you to repentance. And of the propitiation by his blood of the wrath of God in Romans 3. And how Jesus was raised from the dead for our justification in chapter 4.

And what does that give us? In chapter 5 it gives us peace with God. That peace with God leads to a freedom from sin in chapter 6. We're no longer slaves. We have freedom from the wretched people that we are in chapter 7. And that leads us to the great doctrine of our adoption in Christ. and the great hope of the believer that one day we'll be reunited with our Father in heaven where we will spend eternity and there's nothing happening in our lives that is worth comparing to that glory that is to come. And that has grafted us in to the great tree of life in Romans 9 through 11. And then you get to this and you say, by the mercies of God, what a joy, how reasonable is it that I would live for him?

My mom's 80th birthday was a couple months ago. I wasn't able to be with her. I was in China. And I had the idea that I would write her a letter and that I would list 80 things that I'm thankful for about her. But I was nervous, quite honestly. I just thought, I'm going to start, and I don't know how far I'm going to get. It took me a couple of hours. It was the easiest thing in the world.

I could have kept going because how much do any of us owe to a mother? I thought about the lunches she packed me and the hours that I practiced that musical instrument because she made me do it. Thinking about the childhood birthday parties that she threw for me and then all the visits to China over the years and gifts for the grandkids. Could have kept going. It should not be hard for us to have gratitude for the one who brought us into the world.

I went to the post office and I said, I was a little bit late. I said to the man, I said, I want the most expensive, fastest way that you can get there. He said, you don't want to do that. He said, you're going to pay triple the cost. It's going to get there on the same day. I said, it's my mom's 80th birthday. He said, all right, I got it. I got it. Give me some extra. No, he didn't say give me extra money.

Friends, if you don't understand the meaning of the phrase, the mercies of God, your service to God will always feel like a burden. Obeying God will feel like just a duty. Maybe you'll come and hear the preacher exhorting you to read your Bible and come to church and give money to mission and share the gospel with your co-workers. And it feels like just one more thing to add to your to-do list for next week. That's not the Christian life the way it's supposed to be. That's not what devotion looks like. But if you understand mercy, if you really sink some deep roots into just how good the good news is, then your service to God, your devotion to him, will become more than reasonable. It will become grateful devotion. That's verse one. Now I want to ask, what's the fruit of that? Where does that lead? What kind of life is the result?

Dedication to grow

Let's think about point number two, dedication to grow, dedication to grow. Paul writes,

do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable, and perfect.

Now this verse has a structure. There's a two-fold command, do not be, but be, and then a result, that you may be able to discern what is the will of God. Let's begin with the end and focus on the result.

This thing called the will of God. That's what we're after, right? And what you and I really want in life is the will of God. It's what we want to do. It's what we want to be able to discern. He says here that it's good and acceptable and perfect because he wants to get us to want it. This is something we really desire. I mean, how many good and acceptable and perfect things are there in your life apart from the will of God? I submit to you nothing. This is a pearl of great price for us.

Now, when we hear the will of God, our minds can immediately go to the big decisions in life. When we were stuck out of China for four years, Megan and I were constantly asking the Lord, what do you want us to do now? I remember laying in the basement of the par house, looking up at the ceiling at night, and wondering, God, what do you want us to do? What is next for us?

Many of you can relate to that kind of thing right now. Maybe there's some big question looming out there for you. some kind of difficult situation you're trying to see your way out of. But that kind of big-picture decision-making is actually a subset of a much larger thing called the will of God. That takes in the whole of our Christian lives, not just where we live, what job we take, who we marry, the everyday ongoing issues of life. So we could think about 1 Thessalonians 4, 3,

This is the will of God, your sanctification.

Our growth in Christ is the will of God. He wants us to grow.

You're not supposed to be the same this year as you will be next year. So that means all kinds of things. That means putting off sin, putting on righteousness in the daily fight against sin, fighting anger, fighting lust, fighting greed, fighting unforgiveness.

God's will means things like redeeming the time, not doom scrolling our lives away, staring at our phone. I'm pretty sure that your screen time is not helping your sanctification. God's will means things like a man getting his work done efficiently so he can get home to his wife and kids earlier to bless them with his presence. God's will means things like students keeping the honor code of your school even when it can't be enforced. God's will means things like the percentage of my income that's given to the church is not a haphazard thing, but it's a planned and prayed over thing. God's will even covers things beyond the clearly sin or not things. Just because something is not sin doesn't make it good and acceptable and perfect.

It might be selfish, foolish, and wasteful. So even how I spend my free time gets submitted to this scrutiny. Do I attend that Bible study? Should I schedule more kids' activities or leave more time to spend with people? Who should I ask to go to lunch after church?

Do not be conformed

These are all important questions about discerning God's will. And that's what we absolutely need, therefore, is this thing called discernment. To discern means to choose between options, between good and evil, between right and wrong, But even between right and almost right, I can't think of a more life-changing thing than becoming more discerning. So how do we get it? Let's back up to this do not be and but be process. This is how we get discernment. First, the do not.

Do not be conformed to this world.

World here is literally age. Do not be conformed to this age.

The Bible splits history into this age and the age to come. This age is the period of time in between Adam's fall into sin, ending with the return of Christ. It's the age of rebellion against God when sin rules in death. This world or this age, it's the default culture and the current of thoughts that's all around us. They're the voices from friends and extended family and culture and social media, the world. It's the water we're swimming in. The entire Bible is filled with warnings to the believer to resist the world.

God, through Moses, told the Israelites,

You must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I'm bringing you.

Leviticus 18.3, don't do what they do. Don't live as they live. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, said it simply,

do not be like them.

Matthew 6.8. You simply can't be a follower of Jesus and of the world. And that's hard because you and I naturally imitate those around us. None of us want to show up to a party dressed different. Well, maybe a few of us might, but most of us don't want to show up to a party dressed different from everyone else. We tend to conform. I wonder if you've ever seen videos of the famous experiments that Solomon Ash did on conformity in the 1970s. Fascinating, fascinating videos.

He has one test subject and five actors, and he has them come into a room, and there's a screen, and there's a line on the left side that's a certain length long, and on the right side, there's A, B, and C, three lines. It's a simple thing. Which line on this side matches the line on this side? They file in, they sit down. The one test subject is, you know, he doesn't know what's going on. Ask the first person. I mean, it's A. It's clearly A. Which line is the same length? First guy says C. See the guy's head go this way. Second guy says C. Now he's starting to worry. Third guy says C. I mean, it's A. What does he say?

He says C. He says C. I mean, you tell yourself I'd be different. I'd be different, right? If you and I are going to have our lives shaped by devotion to God that fuels dedication to grow, If we're going to be changed to discern what is God's good and acceptable and perfect will, we have to be prepared to be different than the people around us. We're going to have to say no to much of what everyone around us says yes to.

So think about what you watch. We live in a culture where entertainment is normally sexualized. It's graphically violent. It's ethically compromised. Everybody's watching fill in the blank, whatever it is. You feel strange to be the one saying, no, I haven't seen it. I didn't think that would be good for me. Is there anything that your circle, the people around you are watching that you've decided not to watch because you're a Christian? Should be something, right?

Where I live, dishonesty and deceit rule in the workplace. I've been regularly told that to do business, you must fill in the blank. You must drink with clients. You must fudge the data. You must promise things you know you can't deliver. Well, to be a Christian means to say no. What else would it mean except to be honest, to consistently tell the truth? Some of you are young. Maybe you're here because your parents brought you here. You haven't reached the time where it's going to be a choice for you to go to church or not to go to church. You're trying to figure out, do I want to follow Jesus?

Is that what I want to do? Is that what I'm going to do? Here's a simple way to think about that question for you. When you are with your friends, with your peers, and they're going this way, And the voice of conscience tells you, you know that a Christian would go this way. What do you do? Do you ever say, I'm a Christian, when you're not around your Christian friends? That's a simple way for you to think about it. Do you speak up when somebody's getting bullied? Do you laugh at the dirty joke? Do you say out loud, I'm a believer in Jesus? So do we conform? How different are you than the non-Christian around you?

You know, a simple experiment we could do, we took your phone, we took the phone of a non-Christian. Let's say for the sake of argument that we had the password program, we could open anything we wanted to. We could look at screen time. We could look at chat history. We could open bank accounts and see how money is spent. And we were just to compare.

How different would you be? Brothers and sisters, we're called not to conform. Do not be conformed is only the negative half of the instruction. Nature hates a vacuum. You don't stop doing one thing and not start doing something else. So what's the positive half?

Be transformed

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

This word transformed is metamorphio. It's where we get the English word metamorphosis. Wonderful word to describe the change that we're talking about. If a person's the same after they believed in Jesus as before, they've never really believed in Jesus. How does transformation happen?

What happens through the Spirit of God, by the Word of God, as we renew our minds, begins in the mind. What is mind renewal? The word means something like a renovation, a complete gutting of the old house, rebuilding it up from the studs. How do we renew our minds?

I think we can think about it in three steps. We've got to receive. Reflect and replace. First, we've got to receive God's Word. Think both weekly and daily. The first day of the week is about receiving the Word, taking it in, writing some things down, trying to gather up the teaching like a farmer gathers crops. If you hear a faithful sermon on Sunday morning, and later on in the day get asked what the sermon was about and can't remember, that's on you. That's not on the, if it was a faithful sermon, that's on you.

You went to the grocery store, you filled your shopping cart with food, you took it out and then went to get your car and you just drove home. The shopping cart's still at Kroger, it's still over there. You gotta receive it, take it with you, put it in the fridge.

Do it weekly, do it daily. Friend, make it a daily thing to read the word yourself and with others, every day. Maybe as a family over dinner, you fathers take the initiative to open the Bible and read it to your family. Or if you're single and you can meet up with other people just to read Scripture together, what a wonderful thing to do. If there's no intake, there can be no output. You've got to receive the Word into your mind, weekly and daily.

Second, you've got to reflect on God's Word. You've got to reflect on it. You've got to think about it. You've got to turn it over in your mind. You guys are reading through Psalm 119. How many times are you going to hear that as you read through that? "'

Oh, how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day.

'" Psalm 119, 97. Or Joshua 1, 8, "'

Do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth, but meditate on it day and night.

'" Now let's just acknowledge that we live in a terrible age for this.

Many of us are wearing technology right now that is buzzing. We're under the mistaken illusion that we need to know if someone sent us a message right now. If some package has left a distribution center somewhere, I gotta know that right now. Why do we need to know that? Our earbuds are ready to be put in so we can have noise. We're almost never quiet. We're in serious danger of completely losing our attention spans. So if we're going to be renewed by the transforming of our minds, we've got to strike back. How can you reclaim your attention for the Word of God and the sake of your Christian growth?

You could start by taking a walk today. Walk down McElroy, down to Azalea Park. It's July, I understand that. Walk through the woods. Just think about these two verses. Where in your schedule do you plan to get alone with the Lord and to listen and to reflect and to be renewed? If we've got to receive, we've got to reflect. The third thing we've got to do is replace. We've got to replace worldly thinking with biblical thinking. You and I are regularly having thoughts that are not true. You realize that? We tell ourselves things that are not true. I'm never going to change that. I've been struggling with that sin for so long. It's not going to change. That's not true for the Christian.

That's, that's living as though Romans six, we're not there that we're still slaves to sin, but we're not slaves to sin. We got to replace that dead to sin. We're alive to God now through Jesus Christ. We're going to have to consider ourselves dead to sin, even after a hundred defeats. We say to ourselves, this is going to be bad. We speak a negative prophecy over the future. We regularly project the worst case scenario where our fears and anxieties can feed upon it.

We've got to replace those evil prophecies with the truth that we're adopted children of God. That if he's for us, and if the sufferings of this present time are not even worth comparing with the glories that are going to be revealed in us, then the future is as good as the promises of God.

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

It's the work of a home renovator. tearing out the old worthless stuff, installing the new and the strong and the good. So beloved, receive, reflect, and replace. When God changes the way you think, he changes the way you live.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Is our devotion clear?

We spoke at the beginning about what it looks like when someone is devoted to something. What it looks like when an internal spring of love and desire leads to external behaviors. Skateboarders and play directors and guitarists and athletes. Our world is filled with people devoted to all kinds of things. Where I live, so many are devoted to getting rich, making it to the top, being great. And you can see it in their life. You can see what it looks like. Their devotion is clear. What about ours? Is our devotion clear? What does devotion to Christ look like in your life and in mine? Friend, does your devotion to God fuel your dedication to grow?

Friends, remember the mercy he's shown to you. How good is God to not just want to redeem you and adopt you, but then to want you to live in this good and acceptable and perfect will. He's been so very good to us. By his mercy, let's live for him. Please pray with me. Father, what a joy on this first day of the week to remember your goodness to us in Christ. to think about your mercy, which was completely undeserved by us, and has been so abundant in changing us already.

We pray for further grace to trust your word, to believe the gospel, and to grow. I pray that you would take this congregation and mold it more and more into your image, as they love one another, as they worship you together, and as they seek you with their whole hearts. For we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.